Official gazette

An official gazette is the publication in which a government makes its laws, regulations and legally required notices public in their official form. Publication there usually fixes the citable version of a text and often starts the clock for its entry into force. The US version is the Federal Register, which publishes every business day and carried 2,441 final-rule documents from federal agencies in 2025, according to its own API.

Most jurisdictions have an equivalent, under different names: the Journal officiel in France, the Bundesgesetzblatt in Germany, and the Official Journal of the European Union for EU law. The United Kingdom splits the role. The Gazette, which describes itself as the UK's official public record since 1665, publishes statutory notices, most of them about insolvency and deceased estates, while legislation itself appears on legislation.gov.uk, where 1,120 statutory instruments were made in 2025.

Gazettes are the binding-text layer of a compliance team's source list, with three practical consequences:

• Cadence: most publish daily, so capture has to keep pace even if review happens weekly.
• Dates: the publication date, the entry-into-force date and the application date often differ, and the gazette text is where each is fixed. See regulatory lifecycle stages.
• Language: national gazettes publish in the national language, and the gazette text, not a translation or a law firm summary, is the version to cite.

Most gazettes record what has been decided rather than what is coming. The Federal Register is a partial exception because it also prints proposed rules, but the fuller forward view sits in consultations and regulators' published agendas. The survey in how compliance teams track regulatory changes shows how those source tiers fit together.

This entry is general information, not legal advice.